Bob Franken on CNN: Said something about Rove's lawyer giving testimony

When news surfaced this week that Time Magazine reporter Viveca Novak was to be questioned by the Special Counsel in the CIA leak case, furious speculation arose as to what could be of interest to Patrick Fitzgerald about the conversations she had Karl Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, after May, 2004 -- the subject specified in the subpoena. What might her good friend, the notorious loose-lipped Luskin, have said to her? It turns out she didn't hear anything. But she evidently told him quite a bit.

When Matt Cooper was initially subpoenaed in May of 2004 about articles he had written about the CIA leak case, few people knew that Karl Rove was Cooper's original source. But Viveca Novak was one of those people. And sources are now saying that Luskin's attempts to rescue his client from a perjury indictment now center around a conversation he had with Ms. Novak where she told him that his client was Cooper's source. HUGH!!!! The initial subpoena that Time Magazine received in May, 2004 covered two specific articles to which Cooper had contributed, one from June 17, 2003 and the other July 21, 2003. After Time magazine lost a motion to quash, Cooper made a deal with Fitzgerald that allowed him to speak specifically about the person who was of interest to the grand jury -- Scooter Libby.

Cooper was deposed in August of 2004, and it was during this time that Fitzgerald learned that Libby was not the first administration official to tell him that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. So on September 13, 2004, Time and Cooper got a much broader subpoena that threatened to snare Karl Rove in its net. The two refused to comply with the subpoenas, and on October 13, they were held in contempt.

Two days later, on October 15, Karl Rove appeared again before the grand jury and attempted to change his original story. In his earlier statements to the FBI and his first appearance before the grand jury in February 2004, he hadn't mentioned a conversation with Cooper. But now that it looked like Matt Cooper might have no choice but to give him up, Rove went back before the grand jury and claimed that an email he recently found that he had written to Stephen Hadley at the time of the Cooper conversation in 2003 has "jogged his memory" and he now recalled the exchange. The fact that the email had not been produced as a result of the prosecutor's initial subpoenas was chalked up to an error in previous search parameters.